Fonotī Pati Umaga never planned to tell his story. Now he’s living it on-stage

Saturday, 28 February 2026

Fonotī Pati Umaga still talks about his walking days as if they belong to someone else.

In 2005, he fell in his bathroom and broke his neck. At the hospital, when the brace was fitted, he realised he could no longer feel his legs.

For a long time afterwards, he thought his story ended there.

Instead, more than two decades later, Umaga is now at the centre of a major new theatre work built from that rupture ‒ a live, deeply personal music portrait that traces his extraordinary journey from showband bass player to tetraplegic; from private survival to public voice.

On-stage, Umaga does something he resisted for years: he tells his own story ‒ not through biography, but through the rhythm and emotional language that’s carried him through both lives.

Finding music, and himself

Born in Wellington in 1958 to Umaga Tulouna Umaga and Fetai Umaga (née Ieriko), who were Samoan migrants, Fonotī Pati Peni Umaga was the eldest of four siblings.

Growing up mostly in Wainuiomata, Lower Hutt, Umaga attended Wainuiomata College, Avele Boys College in Apia, Samoa, and Seddon High School (now Western Springs College) in Auckland.

Umaga’s family were church-going folk, and music was a big part of his life from a young age. Choir practice would happen at the family home.

His parents put him in piano lessons, having dreams for him to play the church organ. Umaga rebelled, wanting to play the guitar instead.

He was into rock music; white music.

He didn’t know why his father wanted him to speak Samoan in the house or get into the culture, and challenged him on it, telling him it wouldn’t help with getting a job.

Umaga was on a slightly self-destructive path, running away from home on a number of occasions. By 15 he was around gangs, and his best friend’s brother was part of the Mongrel Mob.

His father had wanted him to become a church minister or a lawyer.

“My Dad was a chief and an orator. A very good orator. And he wanted that for me, his oldest son, as well. But that’s not what I wanted. I enjoyed going out and smoking up a storm with my mates after school and going out to parties and dances,” he says.

At the Wainuiomata Mall one day with a gang patch on, Umaga was caught by his younger brother, who then told their father.

Umaga got a hiding in front of his mates that day, and next thing he knew he was on a plane to Samoa to stay with family.

The day he arrived he was put to work on the plantation, picking food in the scorching sun. His father’s family had a traditional Samoan fale, with a toilet that had to be filled by hand, oil lamps, and no hot water shower.

After a year, Umaga returned to Aotearoa, and returned to music.

His father sat Umaga and his brothers down, saying he wanted them to form a family band. The trio didn’t want to play for a church, so they ended up doing clubs and cabaret sets. Their name was Kabasa, and throughout the 1980s they became established in the Wellington circuit.

Umaga played the bass guitar.

He later joined the Holidaymakers musical group, helping perform their hit Sweet Lovers that spent six weeks at number one in 1988.

He also had a record label, Pacific Nation Records, and with his friend George Packard, established the Whitireia Community Polytechnic contemporary music programme (now part of Whitireia and WelTec).

But Umaga’s relationship with music took on special significance when he could no longer walk.

“It was being able to own your own narratives; it was healing. It can be a powerful tool for storytelling, and also bring in other people who can’t express themselves in the normal, formal ways of doing things. … Music transcends all these boundaries, and breaks down a lot of barriers.”

The day everything changed

The accident happened in 2005; May 26 to be exact.

Umaga, who was 46 at the time, fell backwards out of the shower. He remembers doing the running man, trying to catch his balance. His butt hit the floor. Then, the back of his head smacked the wall, and all he heard and felt was a crack.

“Adrenaline was rushing, because I knew something happened,” Umaga tells The Post from his home in Naenae, Lower Hutt.

At Hutt Hospital, Umaga joked with the nurse, asking if they had a size 54-inch neck brace, right before losing all feeling in his legs.

Radiologists tried to scan him, but his stomach would not fit into the MRI machine. And so he was told he had to be taken to Wellington Hospital, and that they would have to operate on his neck.

Umaga thought he was going to die, and phoned his brothers to come in and say his goodbyes.

Waking up from surgery in the intensive care unit, the only things Umaga was able to do for three weeks was talk and move two fingers.

All of a sudden, so many realisations hit him: he could not even wipe his own arse.

“All those stereotypes and stigmas start coming to your head, and you think this is the end of your world.”

Being transferred to the Auckland Spinal Rehab Unit via helicopter, Umaga remembers being stretchered up to the hospital roof while humming the S.W.A.T. theme.

After an expert reviewed all his X-rays at the spinal unit, he was told he would never walk again.

“That was like another light switch just turned off; just darkness.”

Umaga was angry. He wanted to prove the specialists wrong.

After six months in the spinal unit, he started to accept his new life as someone with tetraplegia paralysis, marked by partial or total loss of motor and sensory function in all four limbs, the torso, and pelvic organs.

Lulled into a false sense of security in hospital with 24/7 care, an emergency button, a gymnasium, and readily-available occupational therapists, it was not until Umaga was sent back home that the physical, mental, and emotional work truly began, in getting used to a largely inaccessible society.

“You take that for granted. The moment you come back to Naenae, suddenly you realise you don’t even have a bed when you arrive, … and then the kitchen is not the same. It’s not accessible. And all that stuff really freaks you out big time,” he says.

“In the end, you had to help yourself. Because if I wasn’t able to articulate what I needed, then I wouldn’t have been able to get through it.”

Eventually, Umaga shifted from a state of survival to a more embedded life.

One of his friends, Tessa Siolo-Thompson, suggested he use his background in music, community development and experience as a youth worker with the Anglican social services and Hutt City Council, to work in the disability sector.

“I just said, ‘F… off, I don’t want to go back to that. I can’t even walk. I’m in a f…ing wheelchair, man’. But she persisted and got through to me.”

About two years after his accident, they managed to organise a conference, bringing in other disabled Māori and Pacific Islander wheelchair users.

And so began Umaga’s chapter into advocacy and leadership within the disability community, giving him a renewed sense of purpose in a world that was not built with people like him in mind.

“Ableism is something you have to accept. It just means you don’t have to take on the frustration and the absolute absurdity of people’s views, because it just wears you down. It really wears you down,” Umaga says.

“I’m quite privileged, because I can articulate. There are so many people who are non-verbal, non-communicative, and you just feel like, man, I just want to fight for those people who can’t.

“When I was in the spinal unit, I asked my occupational therapist, ‘How come [other] people are on second-hand-type wheelchairs, walkers and equipment, and we’re burning around in the latest technological advances?’ And she said, ‘Because you’re on ACC, they pay for everything. Because you had an accident, and they didn’t’.

“That is so wrong. I thought, if I can help others who don’t have the same access or opportunities as me, I’m going to do it.”

Owning the narrative

When Umaga first connected with director Maiava Nathaniel Lees and creative producer Sasha Gibb, he wanted to tell a story about everyone who’d supported him to transition from the world of walking to the world of disability.

After a couple of workshops, Lees turned to Umaga and said, “No, Pati, this is about your journey.”

Lees helped Umaga realise that what he’s doing now, is a carrying on of mahi that was happening before he was in a wheelchair.

While Umaga initially resisted being the central character, having never acted or done theatre before, the show is having its premiere in Auckland on March 5 and in Wellington on March 12, as part of two different arts festivals.

Called Music Portrait of a Humble Disabled Samoan, written by Oscar Kightley and choreographed by Neil Ieremia, the show is billed as a music portrait in which sound leads the storytelling and emotion.

It stars young disabled performers, established creatives like Mere Boynton, plus Umaga himself.

Ahead of sharing his life’s story, Umaga, who’s now 67, is going through all sorts of emotions: apprehension, anxiety, excitement, potential opportunities.

He says the journey to develop the piece has been a spiritual experience, as well as a physical one. There has been a lot of trust among the creative team.

Umaga laughs, saying since his accident, he’s almost been busier than before it: travelling the globe, recording and producing music, and being decorated with prestigious awards including a Queens Service Medal for services to the Pacific community in 2012.

He never thought his journey could be of any significance to others; it’s always felt so private.

In sharing it, he hopes it will convey the affect music has had on his journey so far: the people it’s allowed him to meet, the experiences it’s brought him, the depth of emotion it has held.

Umaga also wants to give hope to young people, especially young disabled people, and show them that their futures can be bright; that their talents and skills will give them opportunities in life; that they carry their own important legacies.

“This production is not just about one person; it’s about a whole lot of disabled people that took me to this point. What I want people to know is that we are quite capable of having ‒ of owning ‒ our own narratives, of leading our own change.”

As a child, Umaga saw himself as a follower, not a leader.

Leadership, he says, belonged to his father ‒ the way he would sit the family down and lay down the law, command a room, make people laugh, cry, and earn their admiration in equal measure.

“I never realised how much of that I absorbed,” Umaga says.

These days, he understands leadership differently. He sees its greatest force in the arts ‒ in music’s ability to reach young people in ways nothing else can; to draw out their stories; their confidence; their sense of who they are.

He wants young people to know they can be the leaders of their own lives; that they too can break the glass ceiling.

“That’s the goal. You’re building that capacity for them to continue their own journey and lead their own change.

“… People say, ‘Oh, you’re so humble’. It’s not humble, it’s not humility. It’s just who I am. That’s why the word humble was always tongue-in-cheek.

“Whenever someone gives me a compliment or says, ‘Oh, you got an award, man you’re amazing’, I say, ‘Nah, I’m just a humble disabled Samoan’.”

Music Portrait of a Humble Disabled Samoan plays at Auckland’s Q Theatre, Mar 5-8, tickets from aaf.co.nz; Wellington’s Tāwhiri Warehouse, Mar 12-14, tickets from festival.nz